Although there is still volatility in the US economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, the consistent theme is still the excessive impact on women, economic experts said.
It looks like the jobs report will still be out in January. About 275,000 women left the workforce last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to 71,000 men. And women make up more than half of the 7 million people considered in the report as ‘outside the workforce’ – who are not considered unemployed – but who currently want to work. Overall, nearly 2.4 million women have left staff since February, compared to less than 1.8 million men.
The continued disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on working women will have a lasting effect on the country’s economy, said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“Their productivity, their participation in the labor force is felt in our GDP. “These are not just niche issues, they are actually issues that are critical to our economic growth,” she said. “We know and know long before the pandemic that women are increasingly playing an integral role in the economic security of their families.”
Frye said when she looked at the number of jobs in January: ‘I think it shows that it is a slow recovery. This is not happening anytime soon. ”
‘The consequences for women can take years to recover from, and we do not have years to wait. “Families do not have years to wait,” she said.
Early in the pandemic, the ensuing recession was called a ‘session’, as millions of women were one of the first to lose their jobs when the coronavirus closed the services sector and squeezed the government’s budget. According to statistics from the Bureau of Statistics, women are also responsible for more than 50 percent of the 5,318,000 jobs lost since February 2020. While women gained 87,000 jobs in January, they are still far behind men in returning to pre-pandemic employment levels. In December, the economy contracted by 140,000 jobs in December, while women already accounted for 156,000 job losses, while men gained 16,000 jobs.
The pandemic also forced many women to choose between caring for their children at home and to work, as childcare options dried up and schools became virtual.
“The choices are stark,” Frye said.
Last month, job losses continued to plague the food and bar industry, which, according to McKinsey & Company, accounts for 49 percent of entry-level services. Food and bar services lost 19,000 jobs last month, while leisure and hospitality lost 597,000 jobs in the past two months, according to the Bureau of Statistics. Retail, where about half of the workers are women, has lost 383,000 jobs since February 2020. Healthcare jobs have also declined by 542,000 since before the pandemic.
Colored women, who are more likely to work in the service sector or in government, have been hit hardest by unemployment in pandemics.
Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said some of the jobs women lost during the pandemic did not return, even if the restrictions were lifted, while companies still did not advance at staff level. the pandemic is not.
“The second point of this is that there is still uncertainty and unpredictability for women who want to look for work or re-engage, as schools and day care are still closed,” she said. “These are the calculations that women make.”
“Until we can get the pandemic under control and open schools, it will remain sluggish and we will not see women return to the workforce in real numbers,” she said. “I believe we will continue to see women continue to fall out of the workforce and unemployment levels continue.”
Stephanie Aaronson, director of the economics study program at the Brookings Institution, added that the transition takes much longer if people have to change industries or careers.
Women can also lose their work networks and have to undergo new training, she said.
“As the economy improves and as schools reopen, it may just take longer to get a job,” she said. ‘They may find that the jobs for which they are eligible pay lower wages than their previous jobs and that will be discouraging. I therefore think that it is also possible in this connection that women can only have a persistently lower participation in the labor force than we saw before the recession. ‘
Well before the pandemic, women and people of color were already separated in the sectors that had to be pushed for the first time, said Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy and an economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. While the national unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent in April last year, the unemployment rate of black women was 16.9 percent and for Latinas it was 20.2 percent, according to an analysis of government data by Economic Policy Institute.
This inequality continued only through the recession. In January, the unemployment rate of black women was at 8.5 percent with Latina women at 8.8 percent, while the national rate fell to 6.3 percent, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
“Even in good times, the gaps have always been there,” said Adriana Kugler, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “But we definitely need to do something about it. Things are not going to recover on their own. ”
Increasing women in the labor force could have major consequences for the general economy. A 2015 McKinsey & Company report estimates that if women were to compete equally with men in the economy, global GDP would rise by as much as $ 28 billion by 2025.
Mason said all of these factors are why ‘it’s really important that we really focus on the way we get a fair sex recovery and that we are most affected in our assistance.’
President Joe Biden has proposed a comprehensive $ 1.9 billion stimulus proposal that will increase and expand federal unemployment benefits, distribute direct incentive payments, fund childcare for working people and raise the minimum wage to $ 15 per hour. . These are all efforts that will ‘enable parents, especially women, to get back to work – millions who are not working now because they do not have that care’, Biden said in January.
Biden said in a speech on Friday that raising the minimum wage is the “true answer to the crisis we are in.” According to the Economic Policy Institute, more than half of the employees who benefit from a wage increase are women.
According to an analysis of Biden’s plan by Brookings Institution, including raising the minimum wage, it is estimated that the package will increase the country’s GDP by about 4 percent by the end of 2021 and by 2 percent by the end of 2022, which exceeds the pre-pandemic projections by 1 percent. .
“If we had a national increase in the minimum wage, we would be offsetting the losses in the recession,” Bahn said.
But the plan hit a wall in Congress. Republicans say the plan is too expensive and premature after Congress approved a $ 900 billion aid package in December. Instead, they proposed a $ 600 billion aid program that reproduces Biden’s unemployment insurance, limits direct checks to $ 1,000, and eliminates raising the minimum wage to $ 15.
Early Friday morning, the Senate voted 51-50 to promote the budget vehicle for the aid package, which cannot be blocked by Republicans. The House passed it in the afternoon by a vote of 219-209 and instructed Congress to find a bill.
Biden himself on Friday expressed doubts that the proposed increase in the minimum wage would make the final version of the pandemic relief proposal.
As Congress continues its struggle, women like Stacey Johnson have been pushed out of the workforce in Tampa, Florida, waiting for relief. Johnson, 45, told NBC News she has been living mostly in her car since losing her job in March. She was threatened with eviction from her apartment early in the pandemic after being on rent for six weeks. Instead of risking an eviction on her credit report, she leaves.
“It’s just like one after the other,” she said.
A former chef at a sports bar, she said, applied to a fast food restaurant but was turned down because she was too qualified. Her plan is to still apply for a job while saving $ 220 a month from her weekly unemployment checks until she has enough for a down payment on an apartment. At this rate, she said it would take four months to save what she needed for a home.
“I’ve never been in this situation before, and it’s really depressing,” said Johnson, who is studying business administration at Grantham University in Kansas. ‘It’s like being a stockbroker. You can be at the top of the world for one minute, then the shares fall and everything is gone. As for me, everything is gone. ”